Smokescreens in the Provenance Investigation of Early Formative Mesoamerican Ceramics

Abstract

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Early evidence of the ballgame in Oaxaca, Mexico

“…Non-Gulf Coast societies made their own local emulations of Olmec symbols, but these were apparently not exchanged between regions. Subsequent petrographic analyses have supported the results of the INAA study (21), contradicting one petrographic study (22) that sought to overturn the INAA study's results on the basis of an incomplete understanding of Gulf Coast geology (19). Additional INAA suggests that adjacent regions in Oaxaca may have exchanged vessels with extremely local designs, as opposed to Olmec-style ones, but the data for the one sherd in question do not match the confidence levels of the initial INAA study (17).…”

“…The Olmecs' level of socio-political complexity and impact on other contemporaneous societies remains highly contested (17)(18)(19). Recent chemical analyses through Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis (INAA) have documented that ceramic vessels with and without Olmec-style iconography were crafted and disseminated by the San Lorenzo Olmec to chiefly societies in Central Mexico, Oaxaca, and Soconusco (20).…”

The role of compositional analysis to study the production and distribution of pre-Hispanic pottery

“…Así, según Stoltman, el análisis petrográfico puede hasta contradecir y corregir los resultados del análisis químico de elementos. No sorprende entonces que exista un debate álgido entre los proponentes del análisis químico y el mineralógico en Norteamérica (Neff et al, 2006a;Neff et al, 2006b;Sharer et al, 2006). Es importante considerar frente a estas alternativas que, mientras los análisis mineralógicos se centran en las inclusiones de la pasta, los métodos químicos más comunes analizan la pasta en su conjunto, tanto el componente de arcilla como las inclusiones.…”

Complexity, Interaction, and Epistemology: Mixtecs, Zapotecs, and Olmecs in Early Formative Mesoamerica

“…Details on methodology and statistical techniques, which focused on Mahalanobis distances and multivariate analyses for compositional pattern recognition, have been previously published (Blomster et al 2005;Neff et al 2006). Over 1,000 archaeological pottery and modern clay samples from the Gulf Coast, Oaxaca state, Chiapas, and central Mexico were subjected to Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis (INAA) at the University of Missouri Research Reactor (MURR).…”

“…From the limited INAA sample, it appears that a greater frequency of gray ware pots with Olmec-style symbols were imported at Etlatongo compared with San José Mogote, which supports the greater range of types or styles of Olmec vessels (see above) found at Etlatongo, and further contradicts the idea that the Early Formative Mixtecs were less involved in interregional interaction than their Zapotec contemporaries (Marcus 1989:194). This assertion is fundamentally incorrect as shown by petrographic analyses of clays and pots made in the San Lorenzo vicinity (Guevara 2004;Neff et al 2006). In terms of the fireserpent and were-jaguar categories used by many scholars to characterize abstract Olmec-style designs on pottery, Etlatongo is also more similar to San Lorenzo with its focus on fire-serpent/dragon imagery, while both designs are more evenly represented at San José Mogote.…”